Fool, unspeakable fool that he was not to have foreseen something of this kind with a man of Guthrie’s stamp! He had had moments of uneasiness at the thought of Ardroy’s probable interview with him, but he had never anticipated anything quite so base as this. “Take me to Lieutenant Paton at once!” he said peremptorily to the first soldier he came across.
The man led him towards a barn looming through the mist at a little distance. The door was ajar, and Keith went in, to see a dimly lit space with trusses of straw laid down in rows for the men, and at one end three horses, his own among them, with a soldier watering them. The young lieutenant, his hands behind his back, was watching the process. Keith went straight up to him.
“Can I have a word with you alone, Mr. Paton?”
The young man stiffened and flushed; then, with obvious reluctance, ordered the soldier out. And when the man with his clanging buckets had left the building, Paton stood rather nervously smoothing the flank of one of the horses—not at all anxious to talk.
“Mr. Paton,” said Keith without preamble, “what devil’s work went on in your camp over the prisoner from Ben Loy?” And then, at sight of the look on Paton’s face, he cried out, “Good God, man, do you think that I had a hand in it, and is that why you would not break bread with me?”
Lieutenant Paton looked at the ground. “I . . . indeed I found it hard to believe that you could act so, when you seemed so concerned for the prisoner, but——”
“In Heaven’s name, let us have this out!” cried Keith. “What did Major Guthrie say to Mr. Cameron? He appears to have tried to make him believe an infamous thing of me—that I went back to the shieling that night merely in order to get information out of him! Surely he did not succeed in making him think so—even if he succeeded with you? . . . Answer me, if you please!”
The younger man seemed very ill at ease. “I cannot say, sir, what Mr. Cameron believed about you in the end. He certainly refused, and indignantly, to believe it at first.”
“He cannot have believed it!” said Keith passionately. “‘In the end’? How long, then, did Major Guthrie have him in his custody?”
“He kept him for twenty-four hours, sir—in order to see if he would make any disclosures about Lochiel.” And Lieutenant Paton added, in a very dry tone, turning away and busying himself with a horse’s headstall, “A course which it seems that you yourself advised.”